effective weight loss

Accelerate Fat Loss & Get Fit for Life in 8 Easy Steps

6. Meditate to reduce stress & weight.Sometimes the things that you experience in your life can put a burden on you physically by causing endocrine, or hormonal, events that go on in your body. Medical experts now believe that this is at the root of many degenerative disease processes. In other words, stress has a biological as well as an emotional effect on you and, over time, it can diminish your body’s ability to fortify, protect, regenerate, and heal itself.

Stress can be triggered by emotions, such as anger, fear, worry, grief, or guilt. It can be the result of an injury or trauma, an accident or surgery. Everyday pressures, like family squabbles, impossible bosses, unfaithful spouses, unruly teens, or overdue bills cause stress. An extreme change in sleep patterns, diets, exercise, and even the climate you live in can also create stress. So can chronic illness, pain, allergies, and inflammation. And too much work or too much of anything can create stress. Continue on to learn about how too much stress affects your weight.

Accelerate Fat Loss & Get Fit for Life in 8 Easy Steps

2. Increase your aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise trains muscles to burn fat and increase metabolism. Aerobic exercise means exercising with oxygen, not being winded or out of breath. These types of exercises, which are fairly gentle and nonstop, change your metabolism and also train your muscles to burn more fat. Here’s a key point to keep in mind. Muscles burn fat ONLY in the presence of oxygen. For example, if you’re jogging with your husband and he’s breezing along and singing a song, and you’re so out of breath that you can barely put two syllables together, he’s burning fat but your fat-burning mechanisms have shut down. Muscles burn two kinds of fuel—sugar (glucose) and fat. Your muscles really do prefer to burn fat because it’s more efficient; there’s more of it so it lasts a long time and it produces lots of energy.

Does that mean you shouldn’t do high-intensity sprints every so often? No, as I’ll explain below, but you must make aerobic exercise part of your fitness program at least 5 days a week if you want to lose fat and tone up. By using the big muscles of the thighs and buttocks in an activity that is steady and nonstop (such as cross-country skiing, bicycling, rowing, walking, and hiking), and makes you breathe deeply but doesn’t make you out of breath, you’re supplying oxygen to the muscles, which promotes fat burning in the muscles and makes you burn more food calories. Want to learn how to get fit as quickly as possible? Continue on.

Accelerate Fat Loss & Get Fit for Life in 8 Easy Steps

1. Increase your muscle mass. Muscle burns fat. It’s that simple. Exercise increases muscle, tones it, alters its chemistry, and increases the metabolic rate. When you exercise you actually continue to burn calories even when you’re sleeping but you must exercise correctly to get the best results. Before I describe the best exercises to lose fat and increase metabolism, let’s briefly explore why lean muscle tissue is so important.

As I highlight in my world-renowned Complete Power Package consisting of 14 titles, Renew Your Life: Choose to Live Fully, more muscle means a faster metabolism because muscle uses more energy to exist than fat. Because muscle is a highly metabolic tissue, it burns five times as many calories as most other body tissues, pound for pound. In other words, muscle requires more oxygen and more calories to sustain itself than does body fat. When you have more muscle mass, you burn more calories than someone who doesn’t, even when you’re both sitting still, which is why people who build muscle have an easier time maintaining a healthy weight. They’re simply more efficient calorie burners.

If you increase muscle mass, you increase the number of calories your body is using every moment of the day, not just during exercise, but also at work, play, and even when sleeping. The addition of 10 pounds of muscle to your body will burn approximately 500 extra calories per day. You would have to jog 6 miles a day, 7 days a week to burn the same number of calories. Ten extra pounds of muscle can burn a pound of fat in one week (a pound of fat is 3,500 calories)—that’s 52 pounds of fat a year! Want to know how to increase your lean muscle tissue and my favorite fitness tips that I currently teach clients worldwide and also previously taught to students, staff, and faculty at UCLA for 30 years? Continue on.

While millions of people starve to death in many parts of the world, the United States has the dubious honor of being the fattest country on the globe, with 50% of us being obese. Meanwhile, Americans are preoccupied with their waistlines. We spend more than 40 billion dollars a year on diet foods, diet programs, diet pills, and other ‘guaranteed’ weight-loss regimens and products. Yet, according to the National Center of Health Statistics, we’re getting fatter all the time. (Throughout my 14-title, life-changing collections — Renew Your Life — I communicate in detail on over 100 topics related to being vibrantly healthy in body, mind, and spirit, including everything you need to know to shed extra weight — easily and permanently.)

Experts call obesity an American epidemic—one that brings with it major health problems. Heart disease, endometrial (uterine) cancer and possibly breast cancer, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, immune dysfunction, osteoarthritis, stroke, gout, sleep disorders, gallstones, and diabetes are all associated with obesity. Because I prefer to see the glass as half full, let's put this in a more positive light: Losing even a little weight may significantly improve your health and well-being.

On the flipside, eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia are on the rise, and women’s magazines are not helping when they continue to use models who look like waifs. Take Barbie™, a doll that’s part of most little girls’ upbringing. This model of good looks and perfect body is giving the wrong message about what a healthy woman’s body should look like. Were Barbie an actual person, her body fat would be so low that she probably wouldn’t even be able to menstruate. As little girls treasure Barbie, and teens try to emulate her, she has one accessory that is consistently missing—food. Continue on to find out the control mechanism for obesity, and you may be surprised with the answer.

Surveys reveal that most people pack on between 3-15 extra pounds from mid-November through early April. Here are a few of my favorite tips for saying GOODBYE — once and for all — to extra fat on your body, which includes behavior modification as well as natural herbs and other remedies.

It probably comes as no surprise that Americans are among the fattest people on Earth. Two-thirds of us are overweight and half of us are obese. We try and try to shed those excess pounds, mostly without success. “We spend $40 billion a year on diet programs, diet pills, diet foods and diet regimens,” as I write in my new titles Weight Loss,Living on the Lighter Side, Walking on Air, and The Joy Factor. “Obesity is an epidemic with a vast array of serious health consequences ranging from heart disease to diabetes, immune system dysfunction, osteoarthritis and even certain types of cancer.”

The problem is that keeping weight off entails a major life shift that comes in conflict with the way most people currently live. In the age of drive-thru fast food, supersized restaurant meals, and jugs of sugar-laden soda, we’re expected to be slim and compete with body types achieved by movie stars and supermodels.

Then add into this scenario the previous holidays and current lingering cold weather, which keeps many still homebound and “eating for entertainment.” Most people have the mindset that they can eat whatever they want during this time of year, and more variety of food than usual, because they will start fresh beginning in the new season. Unfortunately, this “fresh start” rarely happens. Furthermore, many people consume as much as 4,000 calories per meal, according to the latest surveys.

Here are the five helpful weight loss tips on eating properly, along with food, herbal, and natural remedy suggestions.

During an interview with Shaneka Marigny on her Body Transformation Summit program, I share my best tips to boost metabolism, supercharge energy, and achieving easy and lasting weight loss in the quickest time possible. To listen now, click HERE.

Permanent weight loss is certainly possible. Each one of you knows someone who has accomplished a long-term goal and maintained significant weight loss for 5, 10, 15 years or more. You can be a success story, too, simply by using some of these simple techniques. Here are your top 10 power strategies for the lifestyle change to achieve permanent weight loss:

Sugar is bad. Most of us already know that. It adds empty calories—those that don’t offer any nutrition, but certainly add pounds. The average American consumes two to three pounds of sugar a week. Even if you’re not adding table sugar to your morning coffee or other foods, look for hidden sources of sugar in unexpected places: bread, mayonnaise, ketchup, spaghetti sauce, and virtually all frozen meals. Sugar plays havoc with your blood sugar. Avoid it at all costs.

There is nothing that replaces a commitment to regular exercise (aerobic and strength training) and a healthy diet, which emphasizes loads of high-fiber, colorful fruits and veggies for effective weight loss. However, there are some very beneficial herbal, food, and probiotic supplements that help burn calories. In my books The Joy Factor,Walking on Air, and Weight Loss,you’ll find some more exciting, cutting-edge information about losing weight and keeping it off, as well as all the details on my best behavioral modification tips and my favorite 10 special herbs and foods that are study-proven to assist your quest for a slimmer you. Here’s a sneak preview:

Sleep plays a major role in glucose metabolism and neuroendocrine function. Research shows that getting a good night’s sleep is a critical part of losing weight. In a study involving 70,000 women, researchers found that women who slept 5 hours per night were 32% more likely to experience major weight gain (an increase of 33 pounds or more) and 15% more likely to become obese over the course of the 16-year study, compared to those who slept 7 or more hours a night.

Stress eating is a major factor in the obesity epidemic. Who isn’t under stress these days? Not only do we eat in some misguided desire to fill up our emptiness or calm the jitters we mistake for hunger pangs, we also eat in response to natural fluctuations in the stress hormone, cortisol, and in our blood sugar.

How many times have you found you’re craving sugar at 4 pm? Or you want a bedtime snack of ice cream or potato chips? Chronic stress elevates blood levels of cortisol, increasing cravings for fattening sweet and salty foods.

Choose to eat 5 small, regularly spaced meals daily about 3 hours apart to help balance blood sugar and prevent overeating due to excessive hunger. This is grazing. British researchers at the University of Nottingham found that obese women who ate regular meals at roughly the same time every day consumed fewer total calories, metabolized calories better, lowered blood cholesterol levels, and showed improvement in insulin production compared with when they ate irregular meals.

It’s an old joke. You buy a whole pie, intending to have one slice. Then you sit down with the pie, in front of the TV and before you know it – where’d the pie go? Somebody stole it! Or, you just downed 1,000’s of calories without even knowing it. Because it takes 20 minutes for your body to get the satiety signal, if you eat fast, you’re consuming more calories than you need, before you’ve even had the chance to get the “that’s enough” signal.

Research shows that the more often a person dines out, the more body fat he or she has. Home-prepared food is usually healthier and more nutritious since most restaurants depend heavily on highly processed foods. As much as possible, prepare your meals at home. Eat out and get take-out foods less often. While I choose not to eat any animal products (I am a vegan), you may choose a different diet. When you do eat away from home, try these tips to help you control portions:

Like it or not, it takes a good walk or run around the park to burn fat. Cardiovascular exercise or cardio is a necessity for burning fat and keeping it off. The good news: You can choose what cardio works for you and what you like to do. Example: if you only have ten minutes to walk in the morning and ten minutes when you get home, that’s the same as walking twenty minutes in one stretch. You don’t need a huge block of time to get the benefit of cardio.

You don’t have to look like "Ah-nold" to benefit from lifting. Weights not only tone you up and make it easier to slip into your favorite jeans, they also help you build muscle, which burns more calories at rest than fat. So, up to 12 hours after your last weight lifting session, you’ll be burning more calories as you sit, walk, and go about your day, making your engine more efficient and easier for you to maintain your weight.

The human body is about 80% water. That means we need to replenish the supply by drinking lots of water every day. Water keeps us hydrated, flushes out toxins and satisfies thirst, which we often mistake for hunger. Next time you’re craving a snack, or even before, drink a glass of water with a slice of lemon or lime to make it tasty – and fill up your tank without adding a single calorie.

Apple Cider Vinegar Nutrition Facts

A healing agent since Biblical times, apple cider vinegar is now known as a superfood by many nutritionists and other health professionals around the globe. It is said that Hippocrates, the Greek “father of medicine," relied on apple cider vinegar as a standard remedy. The current scientific literature and users of apple cider vinegar, which is rich in enzymes and potassium, have corroborated its ability to help in the healing of high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, acid reflux, achy joints, allergies, vaginitis/yeast infections, sore throats, and many other conditions.

There’s a difference between the raw, organic, unfiltered and undistilled apple cider vinegar sold primarily in health food stores and the distilled, clear vinegar that turns up on grocery shelves. The latter lacks the “mother of vinegar” — the cloudy sediment that proponents say contains most of the health-promoting enzymes, acetic acid, bacteria, minerals, and other nutrients from the apple, but which lacks “eye-appeal” to the general public.

I am laughing my way to a happy, gleeful day. Laughter is the elixir for my soul. I look for the good in others and bring humor to every circumstance. With joy and lightheartedness, I celebrate this day.